So now I'm confused...here's what I was planning on doing. Backup with SD, do a clean install of SL, then restore with SD. Then install iLife 09...you're saying that I can't recover photos and music with SD? I wouldn't be able to just drag and drop photos and music into iTunes and iPhoto? SD doesn't have that option? I would think the SD would save photos and music???
No I'm not saying that you cannot recover music and photos, but you have to look at whats going on under the covers.
Lets start with, what do you mean by "restore with SD" ? If you restore everything, you'll just wipe out the upgrade you did. Can you do a selective restore, such as just a single users data - in theory if you know what to restore.. Do you know what exact files to restore to get back photos or music fully, with data such as tracks played, preferences, thumbnail folders, names, events? ?
SD does an exact copy, so your SD backup will be an exact copy of the Tiger files. An iLife app consists of your data, and also the applications that manages and understands that data. iPhoto for example will have the photos, but it will also have the original photos, thumbnails, maybe names, events etc, and some preference files associated with the app. If you just drag all the photos only from the SD backup, you wont be getting the associated preference and maybe other config files, maybe not thumbnails, names whatever. These may be stored with the app directory, or they may be stored in the user directory, in either case they wont come over if you
just drag photos.
Also, when you edit a photo in iPhoto it makes a copy so you can always revert to the original. If you just drag the photos over, without the library and reference data, then it will lose track of that,and you'll end up with a bunch of 'double' photos, each one that has been edited you'll have two. You may also break the association between photos and names, photos and events, and so on.
Next issue, what happens if you drop an iPhoto library, created under an old version of iLife and Tiger, onto SL. Will iLife09 be able to cope with that? Is it expecting something that would be there on SL? Maybe it will work , maybe it wont.
All I"m saying is, talking about dragging 'music and photos' or 'restoring from SD', its more complicated that that which is why my advice is to ask about the best way to upgrade. Maybe it will go really smoothly anyway as long as you drag the right directories - do you know what they are? Or maybe it would be much better to upgrade in a particular sequence. maybe iLife09 first then SL.
My point is, best to ask, best to ask before an upgrade rather than when trying to recover from a mess, and best to ask in a thread which is about an upgrade, and not about the difference between SD and TM, because, to be frank, the fact you even ask that makes me somewhat concerned, given as already posted, its obvious to anyone who knows even a little about Macs, that they are nothing to do with each other, so maybe there is some other stuff you are assuming you'll do which isn't going to work.
Even if I'm totally wrong, its surely best to ask first? And maybe someone who is an expert on Tiger to SL upgrades isnt reading this particular thread, since its apparently abut Super Duper and Time Machine, which as I said, is not your issue at all.
